Managed integration hosting on Azure: Nowhere to run it? I will run it for you

The problem

A vendor or partner will often expect a school to run “a small cloud service” to connect their product to the student system. For a college with a two-person IT office, or none, that is a real obstacle. There is no server to put it on, nobody to watch it, and nobody whose job it is when it stops the week before a term start.

Two ways to do it

In your Azure subscription. If you have Azure, or are willing to open a subscription, I build and manage the integration there. You own the environment, the data and the bill. I have the access you grant me, and you can withdraw it.

In a dedicated environment I run for you. If you would rather not own any cloud at all, I host the integration in an Azure environment set aside for your school alone. It is isolated from every other client, and the agreement between us says what data it may hold and how it is protected.

Either way the design is the same, and so is the exit: everything is built so that it can be handed to your own team later.

What is included

• Serverless by default. Functions that run when there is work to do. No servers to patch and little to pay for when it is quiet.
• Secrets kept properly. Credentials live in a vault, not in code or configuration files.
• Monitoring. Every message is logged, and a failure alerts a person. You get a short health note each month.
• Support hours in writing. Alerts come to me. How quickly I respond, and during which hours, is set out in our agreement before launch, so you know what to expect before you need it.
• Least access. The integration can reach only the systems it needs, with only the permissions it needs.
• Data kept small. It passes records along; it does not build a second copy of your student database.

What we agree before anything goes live

Hosting student data is a responsibility, and your agreement with me has to say so. Before launch we settle what data moves, where it is stored, who can see it, and what happens if something goes wrong. The details are on the security and data handling page, and I am glad to complete your vendor security questionnaire.